earthfamilyalpha

With the advent of advanced global communication, new forms of social contract can be created which transcend the geographic state. These new cybercoops or cyberstates will bring humankind to higher levels of cooperation and understanding.

Monday, December 26, 2005

The Deluge

Everything was standing still. Even those little yellow flowers that sit on the almost impossibly thin stalks were not swaying the slightest.

I looked over at Janelle.

She was quietly looking at the horizon.

If there was a song bird in range, it was hiding.

I grabbed her hand and we headed down the mountain. It was the first day we had been out of our mountain top place in weeks.

It all began with the normal stuff. A cold front was coming down and it was going to stall. In the meantime a warm front that was pregnant with moisture was finding its way up from the Gulf.

The weather service said it would rain.

It did.

On the first day we welcomed the broad and sometimes quite heavy showers. It had been pretty dry through out the winter and some good spring rains would do us all some good.

On the second day, the rains continued. Early in the day, I checked my gauge and I had to empty it. That meant we had already received 6 or 7 inches from the previous day. By now, everything was soaked. More rain didn’t have anywhere to go but into the creeks and streams. The creek that always does get too high, did. But, then the other one that runs through downtown began to overflow its banks. The businesses around those creeks closed and did what they always do when the really big downfalls come.

By now, the town was pretty much shut down. The buses were still running but not on all routes. A lot of people in the country were officially marooned by the rising rivers. That night I told several friends that this rain was as a determined a rain as I had ever seen.

By nightfall, my gauge was full again.

Sometime during the early morning the surrounding soils just gave up and water began to just sit. Soon, it was beginning to trickle into my basement. In an hour, that trickle turned into waterfall. Not to worry though, I have a sump pump that will handle most of it.

“Max, how long is this going to go on?”

“I don’t know Janelle, the two fronts are stalled on top of us, plus they say another tropical wave is headed our way.”

“In May?”

Well, we knew things would get weird when the arctic ice melted, allowing the Arctic Ocean to absorb more sunlight. That created a 10 degree change in Anchorage in less than a season. And we knew that the melting permafrostwould add a lot more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and speed up the warming even more. And we knew that the bacteria in the soil was getting more active and converting more carbon in the soil thus making even more carbon dioxide. And we knew that this year the amount of carbon in the air had increased by 5 parts per million. Just 10 years ago, carbon dioxide increased annually by just over 1 part per million.

That meant that all the critical time estimates by the scientists could be accelerated fivefold.

On the third day, the basements had about a foot of water in them. That meant that the hot water heater pilot light was now officially extinguished.

Since it wasn’t really cool, the hot water didn’t seem necessary at first.

But it was.

On the fourth day, the electricity went down. I figured it would go back up in a few minutes, but it didn’t. By now, I wasn’t even checking the rain gauge. It was more than full every 12 hours or so now. That meant that we were getting close to our annual average rainfall in just four days.

On the fifth day, water was everywhere. Streets were full. Basements were full. Gardens were underwater.

On the sixth day, food was becoming an issue. And, the ultimate loss of utility occurred. The sewage began to back up. That did help with the hunger though.

On the eve of the night, I made the decision.

We would leave our home and go to our mountain cabin. It had solar panels and we had some food there. Plus, the garden there was well drained. I also knew the sewer would work. I carefully drew our route on the road map, carefully avoiding any low spots and water crossings.

We traveled in our 20 year old work truck. It didn’t have any electronics on it, so it was not effected by the general ban on travel. I siphoned gas out of our two other vehicles for the truck and the generator at the cabin. We took what food and water we had and we left late in the evening.

“Are we doing the right thing Max”

“Absolutely”.

I have never been one to get ambiguous in a disaster.

We arrived early the next morning.

It was wet, but not inundated.

The garden was OK, and the food in the freezer was good. Even our water pump was working. The rain water tanks were obviously full. The high efficiency lights powered from the solar panels were working fine and the new lithium ion batteries were fully charged.

Of course, with only a weeks worth of storage, we would need to be very careful in our energy budgeting.

We read and meditated and loved one another for three days.

Then we heard the news.

The great dam that provided water and power for the city was finally overtopped by the constant rain. The river authority was helpless in the management of the flows.

I understand that when the dam failed, that you could hear the boom of it for miles around...that it shook the ground as it moved from its moorings.

The wall of water, apparently 75 feet in height and 30 miles long, did an amazing job of erasing the landscape of everything made, by God or man.

Naomi Shihab Nye is San Antonio's most celebrated poetess. She was selected by Texas Monthly Magazine as one of the "20 most impressive, intriguing and influential Texans" for 1998. Recently, her poetry has attracted the attention of Bill Moyers, whose PBS segment on living American poetsfeatured Nye reading some of her poems. In 2002 Moyers interviewed her on his PBS program NOW and had her read his favorite poem of hers, "The Art of Disappearing."

I start the waxing sun with hope and love,and the deep knowing,that peace is our nature,and that the gift of timeis the true sacred mystery.SB will be back after the holidays.

"The seasons of the year are caused by the 23.5º tilt of the earth's axis. Because the earth is rotating like a top or gyroscope, it points in a fixed direction continuously -- towards a point in space near the North Star. But the earth is also revolving around the sun. During half of the year, the southern hemisphere is more exposed to the sun than is the northern hemisphere.

During the rest of the year, the reverse is true. At noontime in the Northern Hemisphere the sun appears high in the sky during summertime and low in the sky during winter. The time of the year when the sun reaches its maximum elevation occurs on the day with the greatest number of daylight hours.

This is called the summer solstice, and is typically on JUN-21 in the Northern Hempisphere -- the first day of summer. "Solstice" is derived from two Latin words: "sol" meaning sun, and "sistere," to cause to stand still.

The lowest elevation occurs about DEC-21 and is the winter solstice -- the first day of winter, when the night time hours are maximum.

In pre-historic times, winter was a very difficult time for Aboriginal people in the northern latitudes. The growing season had ended and the tribe had to live off of stored food and whatever animals they could catch. The people would be troubled as the life-giving sun sank lower in the sky each noon. They feared that it would eventually disappear and leave them in permanent darkness and extreme cold.

After the winter solstice, they would have reason to celebrate as they saw the sun rising and strengthening once more. Although many months of cold weather remained before spring, they took heart that the return of the warm season was inevitable. The concept of birth and or death/rebirth became associated with the winter solstice.

The Aboriginal people had no elaborate instruments to detect the solstice. But they were able to notice a slight elevation of the sun's path within a few days after the solstice -- perhaps by

DEC-25.

Consequently, celebrations were often timed for about the 25th. "

If you are planning to build a solar house or addition, today and tomorrow are great days for marking the points of the sun's setting and rising.

Because it is close to the third quarter, the moon, which will be rising around 2:00 A M, will be in the place of the sun during the equinox. You can therefore use it to help with your placements in the mornings today and tomorrow.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

The Peacemakers

The practicalities of the world... war, greed, self defense, national pride, require us to lay down the teachings as we cavalierly embrace the mundane aspects of the belief system.

This piece by Wendell Berry says it very well.

It was sent to me by a friend.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

Any observer would have to say that Christianity is fashionable at present in the United States. This might be a good thing, except that the observer, observing more closely, would have to conclude that, to the extent that Christianity is fashionable, it is loosely fashionable. It seems to have remarkably little to do with the things that Jesus Christ actually taught.Especially among Christians in positions of great wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus' commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic.

According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective "Christian." (For don't we know that everybody named Rose smells like a rose?)

This process appears to have been dominant among Christian heads of state ever since Christianity became politically respectable. From this accommodation has proceeded a monstrous history of Christian violence.

War after war has been prosecuted by bloodthirsty Christians, and to the profit of greedy Christians, as if Christ had never been born and the Gospels never written.

I may have missed something, but I know of no Christian nation and no Christian leader from whose conduct the teachings of Christ could be inferred.

One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and of the contents of the Gospels without feeling that something is amiss. One may feel that, in the name of honesty, Christians ought either to quit fightingor quit calling themselves Christians. One way to see how far belligerent Christians have strayed from the words of Christ is to make a list of the Gospel passages in which Christ addresses explicitly the issues of human strife, forgiveness, compassion, and peacemaking.

They have justified their disobedience on the grounds of the impracticality of obedience, though we have little proof of the practicality of disobedience, and precious few examples of obedience.

The implication invariably has been that for a few feckless worshippers of God to obey Christ's commandments may be all right, but in practical matters such as war and preparation for war we will obey Caesar.

The Christian followers of Caesar have thus committed themselves to an absurdity that they can neither resolve nor escape: the proposition that war can be made to serve peace; that you can make friends for love by hating and killing the enemies of love. This has never succeeded, and its failure is never acknowledged, which is a further absurdity.

The world's survival, so far, of this absurdity is explainable by the relative smallness, until recently, of the scale of war, and by the relative controllability, until now, of the most destructive weaponry.

But now the scales of practicality have come to be differently weighted. The official terrorism of the Cold War and the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" have already made us familiar with the ultimate absurdity: that we (or some other "we" equally devout and patriotic) may have to destroy the world in order to defend ourselves.

To the surprise of some, no doubt, it is possible to look upon such an eventuality as impractical.

To avoid it, we are going to need a better recourse than Caesar's.

If we ever should become sane enough to reject total destruction as a means of victory, then, as my friend Wes Jackson once said to me, our evolutionary biologists will have to reckon how we could have received the best instruction for our survival two thousand years before it was most desperately needed.

Christ told us how to survive when He answered the question, Who is my neighbor?

In the tenth chapter of Luke,He tells the story of a Samaritan who cared for a Jew who had been badly wounded by thieves. As we know from the preceding chapter, in which the Disciples suggest in effect the firebombing of a Samaritan village, the Samaritans and the Jews were enemies.

To modernize the story, then, and so to understand Christ's answer, we may substitute any other pair of enemies: fundamentalist Christian and fundamentalist Muslim, Palestinian and Israeli, captor and prisoner.

Japan’s third-biggest automaker said in a statement it would build a new factory for thin-film solar cells on the site of a car plant in Kumamoto prefecture, on the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu.

The company said it aims to generate annual sales of $40 million to $70 million from solar cells once the factory’s output reaches full annual capacity of 27.5 megawatts, enough to power about 8,000 households.

Honda will be competing with major solar cell manufacturers such as Kyocera, Sharp and Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

Solar for hydrogen?

Honda has been testing the thin-film solar cells at 13 facilities, most in Japan but also in Thailand and Torrance, Calif., where its North American operations are headquartered.

The U.S. project uses solar power to get hydrogen from water, thereby powering vehicles that run on fuel cells. The technology is still prohibitively expensive, but researchers have lowered costs significantly in recent years.

A Honda spokeswoman did not say when the factory would hit full capacity and declined to disclose the size of the investment, which the Nihon Keizai business daily estimated would be just short of $100 million.

Less CO2 in production

Honda said its solar cells would be composed of non-silicon compound materials, consuming half as much energy and generating 50 percent less carbon dioxide during production when compared with conventional solar cells made from silicon.

Many scientists tie manmade carbon dioxide emissions to global warming. The company aims to sell the solar cells for both residential and industrial use.

It will initially target the Japanese market."

By using thin film made from a compound of copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS), Honda’s next-generation solar cell achieved a major reduction in energy consumed during the manufacturing process to approximately 50% of that required by conventional crystal silicon solar cells.

Honda claims further that this solar cell has achieved the highest level of photoelectric transfer efficiency to date for a thin film solar cell, almost equivalent to the conventional crystal silicon solar cell.

The mass production of Honda’s thin film solar cell became possible with a new mass production process developed by Honda Engineering – a production engineering company that has long developed production equipment and technologies for Honda’s various products.

This commitement from Honda shows the remarkable difference between Japanese and American auto makers.

Monday, December 19, 2005

Perversities

Over the weekend, I was speaking with a friend in the medical community about the notion of perverse mechanisms. The dictionary does not quite get the right definition for my use of the word. I do not mean "marked by immorality; deviating from what is considered right or proper or good". Nor do I mean "resistant to guidance or discipline". "Marked by a disposition to oppose and contradict "perhapsgets a little closer.

The definition of perverse that fits this use is "negative or unhealthy".

PerverseMechanisms provide the foundation for the concept, propounded by some social scientists and philosophers, that many of the underlying causes of non sustainable and seemingly irrational civil behavior do not come from some dark greed zone or from some firery hell where evil designers lurk in the underworld and work overtime to devise our undoing.

No, these social thinkers argue that many of our truly bad ways of doing things come from something a little less easy to moralize on, and in many ways, a lot easier to fix.

I'm not sure who first brought the issue up, but the idea is fairly simple.

Many of the things that we do as a culture that lead towards "ends" that range from "catastrophic" to "just plain old dumb" come from the way we have structured ourselves, our business relationships, and our daily lives.

For example, with my friend in the medical community, I mentioned how health care in the eastern tradition of acapuncture is actually based on health. Quite simply, the patient, or in this case the client, pays the doctor to keep them healthy. If they fall sick, payments stop.

The mechanism that is in place today of course is just the opposite. We pay our medical professionals when we become ill.

The more ill we become, the more money we must pay. The system, no matter how moral and self regulated it may be, contains a perverse mechanism at its foundation which will eventually bring the system or the society it serves into ruin.

The mechanism is perverse, not evil.

And without an equal mechanism to produce health, it will produce bad results.

Perverse Mechanisms abound in our society.

When we hire an architect to build our house, his payment is often based on a percentage of the cost of the house. No matter how great a guy or gal he or she may be, it will be in their best economic interest to build your house in such a way as to maximize their fee. They will choose the most expensive materials, the most expensive flooring, and they will oversize your appliances, just in case you need the extra capacity. The result is an inefficient home with an AC system that is over sized and a not-so- gracious portion of almost everything else.

The client pays at the beginning. And he pays throughout the term of his life in that house for the extra energy required to service the oversizing that the perverse mechanism created.

If the architect's fee was based on how little energy the house used, the mechanism would no longer be so perverse.

Non perverse business relationships would do a lot to make our economic system more efficient and less wasteful.

Why should your stock broker be paid by the total amount of stocks you buy?

Why should he not be paid based on your profits or gains in the market?

Why should you pay for your car, if it not running?

If it stops running, you should simply return it to the dealer and tell him you will buy from another dealer if he can't provide a car that is more reliable. True competition would then incent very reliable cars. If the car dealer or manufacturer is making a tidy sum fixing their own product, there is a perverse mechanism in place that invites mechanical mediocrity.

Restaurants are a good example of where perverse mechanisms are kept to a minimum. If you like the food, you pay for it. If it doesn't make you sick, you come back.

Corporations unfortunately, have discovered that perverse mechanisms can be very effective ways to create business. If you create a product(cigarettes) that has poisons in it or produces poisoned pollution, the consumer pays and then he gets sick. If you own the drug company that manufactures the antidote for your poisons, the consumer pays you again. If the consumer goes to the hospital and you own the hospital, the consumer or the insurance company pays again. If there is insurance, and the corporation owns the insurance company or underwriter, the consumer pays again. And if the consumer dies,(and that is somewhat certain) and the corporation owns the cemetary, the consumer pays again.

The whole system them becomes one large gigantic perverse mechanism on steriods.

And here is a piece of the Guardian Story,Reflections in the Evening LandHarold BloomSaturday December 17, 2005The Guardian

Huey Long, known as "the Kingfish," dominated the state of Louisiana from 1928 until his assassination in 1935, at the age of 42. Simultaneously governor and a United States senator, the canny Kingfish uttered a prophecy that haunts me in this late summer of 2005, 70 years after his violent end: "Of course we will have fascism in America but we will call it democracy!"

I reflected on Huey Long (always mediated for me by his portrait as Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's novel, All the King's Men) recently, when I listened to President George W Bush addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was thus benefited by Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV channel, which is the voice of Bushian crusading democracy, very much of the Kingfish's variety.

Even as Bush extolled his Iraq adventure, his regime daily fuses more tightly together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy.

Contemporary America is too dangerousto be laughed away, and I turn to its most powerful writers in order to see if we remain coherent enough for imaginative comprehension. Lawrence was right; Whitman at his very best can sustain momentary comparison with Dante and Shakespeare. Most of what follows will be founded on Whitman, the most American of writers, but first I turn again to Moby-Dick, the national epic of self-destructiveness that almost rivals Leaves of Grass, which is too large and subtle to be judged in terms of self-preservation or apocalyptic destructiveness.

Ahab carries himself and all his crew (except Ishmael) to triumphant catastrophe, while Moby-Dick swims away, being as indestructible as the Book of Job's Leviathan. The obsessed captain's motive ostensibly is revenge, since earlier he was maimed by the white whale, but his truer desire is to strike through the universe's mask, in order to prove that while the visible world might seem to have been formed in love, the invisible spheres were made in fright.

God's rhetorical question to Job: "Can'st thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" is answered by Ahab's: "I'd strike the sun if it insulted me!"

The driving force of the Bushian-Blairians is greed, but the undersong of their Iraq adventure is something closer to Iago's pyromania.

This year has been one of the hottest on record, scientists in the United States and Britain reported yesterday, a finding that puts eight of the past 10 years at the top of the charts in terms of high temperatures.

Three studies released yesterday differ slightly, but they all indicate the Earth is rapidly warming. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has concluded 2005 was the warmest year in recorded history, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.K. Meteorological Office call it the second hottest, after 1998. All three groups agree that 2005 is the hottest year on record for the Northern Hemisphere, at roughly 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit above the historical average.

Scientists said yesterday that these differences should not detract from their common conclusion that the world is experiencing serious climate change, driven in part by human activity.

Researchers recently found by drilling ice cores that there is a higher concentration of carbondioxide in the atmosphere than in any time in the last 650,000 years, which reflects that humans are burning an increased amount of fossil fuels to power automobiles and utilities.

The Earth has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century, with 1 degree of this increase occurring in the past 30 years. This climate change has brought unusually prolonged droughts in some regions and heavy precipitationin others, while the Arctic's sea ice has shrunk to its lowest level since observers started using satellite records in 1979.

Some global-warming skeptics questioned the significance of yesterday's findings. "Saying that 2005 was a near-record is like saying that a plane that landed safely could have crashed," said William O'Keefe, chief executive officer of the George C. Marshall Institute. "It is trying to make news where none exists."

Now, let me see if I can understand Mr. O'Keefe.

If the hottest year on record is a safe landing,

What is the plane crash that he calls news?

Did the year need to miss a week to make news?

Does the earth need to stop turning?

Comments and excuses from Global Climate Change skeptics, like many other recent administration operations, have become particularly tortured, but this one pretty much leaves me truly puzzled.

I guess some just like it hot.

But actually some just like to sell out.

Here is a look at Mr. O'Keefe and the Marshall Institute and their payments from Exxon. There is little surprise here, given that Mr. O'Keefe's bioat the Marshall Institute states that he has been the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the American Petroleum Institute .

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Mr. Frosty

Last week, we had a pretty good cold spell come in. It was early for our part of the country. Generally, we don't get cold weather until January.

When I came home in the afternoon, I noticed that my house, which has a really super furnace in the basement, was not really very warm. I looked at the thermostat. It was set for 70, but the house temperature was 60.

So I went down to the basement to check things out. I watched the gas come on for a minute, and then I heard some clicks and then the gas would shut down and the fire would go out. Then, a few seconds later, I would hear some clicks, the gas furnace would reignite and burn like Ms. O Leary's Chicago for a few seconds, and then it would shut down.

I watched this go on for several minutes and decided to dive in and see what was going on.

I took the face plates off and saw that the washable filter was totally rediculous, so I gave it a good cleaning. Since everything was already frozen outside, I had to do this in my kitchen sink, which made a good mess. I reasoned that the temperature sensor in the stack was shutting the system down because of the reduced air flow. That would make the unit think that the blower motor was going out, and it would shut itself down before any real harm occured.

I put it in.

I watched it.

In a few minutes, it started the strange cycling again.

So, I called my trusty AC-Heating company who came out almost immediately. He did his tests, and couldn't really see anything obviously wrong. Then, we decided to see if the gas pressure was right. He took the little tap out on the gas side and attached his pressure gauge.

It was low, about a third of what it should be.

Then, I went upstairs, and turned on the fake fireplace to see what that would do.

That brought the pressure down even lower.

My unit was fine, but the gas pressure coming in was not.

So, I called the gas company and was immediately put into a service phone wait of many minutes. So I called back and asked the dispatcher if he had been receiving low pressure calls.

He said, "Yes, I believe we are having problems maintaining pressure out there."

Now, low gas pressure is a lot like not having water pressure. It is a huge big deal. Low gas pressure shuts down all kinds of things. It's very dangerous, and it's a really unusual thing to happen.

I have been reading about gas supply problems, but they weren't getting much traction in the mainstream press.

Falling gasoline prices make it easy to believe the nation has seen the last of the energy woes that swept in behind this year's Gulf Coast hurricanes. But they don't fool an unemployed woman on the Crow Indian Reservation, using the electric oven to warm her house on increasingly crisp Montana nights because her natural-gas heat has been cut off.

For brickyard workers in Mill Hall, Pa., unemployment looms after the holidays, because it will be too expensive to fire the clay kilns this winter. And one retiree in a mobile home in Millinocket plans to take her asthma medication once daily instead of three times as prescribed, to save money to pay the kerosene bills that will soar in Maine's bitter cold.

With the season's first snowfall hitting the Northeast last week, it is becoming apparent that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita did far more to the nation's energy equation than spoil Labor Day vacation drives. The storms upset the already precarious balanceof the nation's supply and demand for fuel. So much Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas production remains in disarray that even with a mild winter, Americans face a Big Chill: astronomical heating bills--on average, 38 percent higher than last year's record costs for natural gas and 21 percent higher for oil.

Triple threat. That means hundreds of closed factories and enormous hardship for low-income and working poor families, who can expect scant federal government help. And if bitter cold rides in on Mother Nature's coattails, extraordinary measures will be needed to keep energy flowing, particularly in the Northeast, as natural-gas shortages spill over into oil and electricity supplies. "We pray for warm weather. We have a prayer chain going," says Diane Munns, an Iowa regulator who is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. "People are talking not just about high prices but actual shortages."

Adds Matthew Simmons, a prominent Houston energy investment banker, who has warned of a new era of scarcity: "We're headed into a winter that could be a real winter of discontent."

In the dark. The second threat is a severe electricity shortage in the Northeast--with possible brownouts or blackouts. Deregulated natural-gas-fired power generators, under no legal obligation to serve customers as the old monopoly electric companies were, can simply stop generating power.

Some plants will be interruptible customers with no backup fuel source. But in other cases, power plants that have firm natural gas contracts will stop generating electricity anyway and sell their fuel at enormous profit. That is precisely what happened during the three-day January 2004 cold snap, when more than 25 percent of New England's generating capacity went off line and the reserve margin was near zero.

"A frozen New Orleans." A winter failure could prove catastrophic, because any extended loss of heat could cause water pipes to burst in residential and commercial buildings alike. Also, the thousands of "traps" where steam escapes (and billows from manhole covers) could freeze and fail, causing distribution pipes to crack or lose pressure. Former Central Intelligence Agency chief Jim Woolsey, now active on energy issues, argues that parts of the city "could resemble a frozen New Orleans."

Whether because of cost or cold, officials are bracing for human suffering across America this winter. "Forces can come together that turn crisis for some into disaster--that's really what I think we could be looking at this winter," says Iowa energy assistance director McKim. "I hate to sound like the voice of doom, but somebody has to say this stuff. It's just like Hurricane Katrina. They knew it was coming, but little was done to prepare an effective response. And the same thing is happening here."

Where I live, our winters are never very cold.

But just that one day with low gas pressure, and my house dropping to 60 degrees, reminded me of the vulnerabilities we all face.

Yesterday, the price of natural gas was almost $15.00 / MCFat the Hub where we buy our gas.

That means that electricity will go up and your heating bill will probably double this year.

That is the good side.

The bad news would be low pressures that turn off your furnace and leave you and your house in the cold as suppliers struggle to keep their systems properly pressurized.

In my house in Mexico, I have lots of candles. I mean lots of candles. They burn reasonably safely and they are pretty. They do a remarkably good job of keeping the chill out of the air. They can take a small room and make it warm and pretty.

Besides, it's the Holidays. And who knows? Mr. Frosty may come and sit on your park bench.

America's Shame

While the networks, the cable channels, NPR, PBS, and the rest of the war stenographers fill your heads with purple fingers and the tall talk of terror, one can appreciate the candor and non-pulled punch of this lead editorialin the NY Times.America's Shame in MontrealNew York TimesDecember 13, 2005

"The best that can be said of the recently concluded meeting on climate change in Montreal is that the countries that care about global warming did not allow the United States delegation to blow the whole conference to smithereens.

Washington was intent on making sure that the conferees required no more of the United States than what it is already doing to restrain greenhouse gas emissions, which amounts to virtually nothing.

At least the Americans' shameful foot-dragging did not bring the entire process to a complete halt, and for this the other industrialized countries, chiefly Britain and Canada, deserve considerable praise.

It cannot be easy for America's competitors to move forward with costly steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while the United States refuses to carry its share of the load. Nevertheless, the Europeans and other signatories to the 1997 treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions - a treaty the Bush administration has rejected - promised to work toward new and more ambitious targets and timetables when the agreement lapses in 2012.

For its part, the Bush administration deserves only censure. No one expected a miraculous conversion.

Instead, the principal negotiators, Paula Dobriansky and Harlan Watson, continued to tout the benefits of an approach that combines voluntary reductions by individual companies with further research into "breakthrough" technologies.

That will not work.

While a few companies may decide to proceed on their own, the private sector as a whole will neither create new technologies nor broadly deploy them unless all countries are required to do their share under a regime that combines agreed-upon targets with strong financial incentives for reaching them.

To believe that companies will spend heavily to reduce emissions while their competitors are not doing the same is to believe in the tooth fairy.

The Europeans are finding solace in the fact that the Americans - after much kicking and screaming, and after public rebukes by Canada's prime minister and a surprise visitor named Bill Clinton - finally agreed to join informal "nonbinding" discussions that will try to entice developing countries like China and India into the process.

It's certainly true that without the developing nations on board, any effort to keep greenhouses gases at manageable levels will be for naught. China, for example, is building coal-fired power plants at a rapid clip and is expected to overtake the United States as the biggest producer of greenhouse gases in 20 years.

But talk is cheap, and nonbinding talk is even cheaper. And talk alone will not get the developing world into the game.

Why should India and China make major sacrifices while the United States, in effect, gets a free ride?

Monday, December 12, 2005

Climate Terrorist

If you have been following the Climate Change meeting in Montreal, you know that the US delegation has been a little bit cantankerous at best. Here is the most recent act of diplomatic terror from the delegation representing the corporate polluters that are allowed to hide and set up their corporate terror training camps in the geographic state of the United States.Breakthrough as US joins climate talksThe HeraldCalum McDonald

American delegates have signed up to talks on long-term measures to tackle global warming in what is seen as a major breakthrough on climate change.The refusal of the US government to accept any deal involving a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions appeared to have killed off any chance of a breakthrough at the summit in Canada over the weekend.

US delegates walked out of the climate change conference in Montreal, but they later returned and agreed to sign up to non-binding talks.

The acceptance of the American government to bow to world pressure and finally take part in multilateral talks on global warming is seen as a breakthrough.

It was welcomed by environmental groups.Bill Hare, of Greenpeace International, said: "The Bush administration blinked. The world should remember that."The U-turn came after years of intransigence and foot-dragging over the issue of pollution and global warming.

Since pulling out four years ago from the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement for cutting pollution which contributes to global warming, the US government has refused to co-operate in multilateral talks.American delegates walked out of the Montreal talks without reaching agreement, but then, according to Margaret Beckett, the environment secretary who led the British delegation, a series of telephone calls between London and Washington resulted in them rejoining the talks.

When they returned, the US delegation agreed to sign up to non-binding talks on long-term measures to tackle global warming.

And then, there is thisstory in the Financial Times which puts a slightly different spin on the US change of heart.

"The US had hinted it might be prepared to cut a deal from the start of the ministerial talks last Wednesday. Until this summer, Washington argued that to talk about the future of co-operation on climate change under the UN would be "premature".

But Paula Dobriansky, the US under-secretary of state for global affairs, signalled a significant change of direction that could lead to a deal. She said the US would refuse to sign up to "formalised discussions" that were geared towards "a one size fits all approach".

The proposed discussions were expressly framed to sustain a variety of approaches, without resorting to formal negotiations; a series of minor amendments to this effect allowed the US to sign up.

Some environmentalists fear the US may yet use its place at the table to block or stall future progress.

Although this is possible, Richard Kinley, acting head of the UN's Climate Change Secretariat, described the meeting as "one of the most productive UN climate change conferences ever".

I don't know how you feel when you realize that your government is working hard to not only not help in the solution to one of humankind's great issues, but is actively working or possibly coniving to frustrate the rest of the nations from solving the issue too.

It makes me realize that this administration is actively pursuing policies that are very dangerous to the well being of us all.